This disclosure is related to highly crystalline electrically conducting organic materials, methods of manufacture thereof and to articles comprising the same. In particular, this disclosure relates to highly crystalline electrically conducting oligothiophenes and oligothiophene mixtures, methods of manufacture thereof and articles comprising the same.
Electrically conducting organic materials and semiconducting organic materials are often used in electronic devices that contain displays (e.g., computers, television sets, and the like), as well as in solar cells, and the like. They are employed in these devices in the form of thin film transistors that have flexible and non-flexible substrates. The combination of easy fabrication using methods such as ink-jet printing and roll-to-roll printing, the mechanical flexibility and modest charge mobilities of solution-processable conducting and semiconducting organic materials has the potential to transform the electronics industry. One challenge to the application of organic materials in digital electronics is the inherent complexity of the electrical properties of organic films due to the inherent high degree of disorder in molecular solids.
Electron mobility within semiconducting conjugated polymers is dependent upon intrachain and interchain charge carrier hopping events. For example, charge carriers can hop between different chains due to the presence of intermolecular overlapping electron densities, such as π-π stacking. Consequently, the charge carrier mobility can depend on various aspects of the thin-film structure, such as the crystallinity, orientation of the crystals, electron cloud overlap in the unit cell, and the connectivity between ordered regions of the polymer.